


Life In This One Yet

by violentdarlings



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Episode Fix-it: s08e04 The Last of the Starks, Episode: s08e04 The Last of the Starks, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, d&d can pry jorah mormont's happiness out of my cold dead hands, more important things in Westeros than that ugly chair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 07:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19001374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: Just another Jorah/Dany fix-it.





	Life In This One Yet

Eventually, hands come to take Jorah away from her – Jon, and his flame-haired wildling ally, Tormund, who scoops her knight’s broken body into his arms as easy as picking up a child. Jon draws Daenerys to her feet, and he looks wretched, covered in dried blood and mud and worse, he smells like a sewer. But his face is kind, and Daenerys can hardly remember the days when she fancied herself in love with this man, this bastion of the icy North.

“Tormund will take him to the others,” Jon tells her gently, but the giant wildling, stomping away but hoisting his burden with the utmost of care, grunts derisively.

“A bit soon for that, Jon Snow,” he scoffs, but he still pronounces Jon’s name in that same way they all do, like he’s something just a little beyond them, like Melisandre’s magic clings to him still. “I’ll be taking him to Maester Crow, there’s life in this one yet.”

Daenerys will never forget, for all her years to come, that it was Tormund’s voice that kicked her heart back into beat.

There are things she sees, as Daenerys follows Jon back into the castle walls, and if her mind can’t quite make sense of them then Dany isn’t inclined to be too harsh towards herself. The entrance to the crypts break open and the first out is of course Lady Stark, who goes pale when she sees Jon, before flushing almost the same colour as her hair. “Jon!” she cries out, and Jon, looking like he’s only just remembered he is more than a blade and a beating heart, goes to her.

She’s nearly taller than he is, and even as they embrace they’re both tackled by a bloody wraith and nearly go down in a heap. Jon laughs aloud and lifts the wraith up into his arms, and Sansa is kissing every inch of her sister’s face that she can reach. “You killed him,” Daenerys overhears, and wants to hear more, except.

“Idiot!” Tyrion bellows, just come up from the crypts, and Daenerys follows his gaze to three armoured figures who still haven’t put their blades down. One of them, in the faltering light of the dawn, tosses his sword aside into the dirt, his grin splitting his face in two and his arms spreading open.

“Don’t look so surprised, little brother,” Lannister calls back, and the two brothers come together in an embrace that looks almost painful, not six feet away from Daenerys; the Kingslayer on his knees in the dirt, his armour more blood than shine, and Tyrion appears to be shouting into his ear while simultaneously sobbing his heart out.

“Who’s the stupidest Lannister now, thinking I’d die in fucking Winterfell, of all places?” Lannister says, low in his brother’s ear, but still loud enough for Daenerys to hear. “Come on, baby brother.” The taller man’s cheeks are wet. “I love you, you know.”

“Love you too,” Tyrion chokes back, his face buried in his brother’s neck, and Daenerys trades a long look with her father’s killer over Tyrion’s golden-brown curls.

She bows her head, and steps away.

All around her, people are walking, running into one another’s arms, crying, shrieking, kissing, _breathing_. But she is a queen, and Daenerys has no kin, no one to hold her, no one brave enough to dare –

Not until Missandei appears out of the throng, blessedly here and alive, and just like that Daenerys isn’t a queen anymore, just a woman who’s survived the War for the Dawn, and she stumbles into her friend’s arms.

 

She almost misses the start of the feast.

Sam has set up an infirmary in one of Winterfell’s lesser used halls, but it is emptier than Daenerys would have expected. “The wights don’t often leave survivors,” Sam tells her grimly when she asks – grim, perhaps, because of their surroundings, or simply because she executed half his family. Dany doesn’t have the heart to tell him that his shirt is on inside out, or that there’s a fresh passion-mark blooming on his jaw – his wildling wife is there, sedately tending to an Unsullied soldier’s injured arm, but her hair is dishevelled and Sam keeps glancing back at her, a tender light in his eyes.

Dany doesn’t blame them. Fucking is one of those things people just do when they survive something impossible, and blood runs hot after battle. “Is there anything I can do?” she asks Sam quietly as he surveys his hall, and ignores the surprise in his quick glance.

“We have enough hands to attend the wounded, for now,” he replies, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Jon was looking for you.” There it is again, that tone. Like Jon’s something more than man.

“The feast,” Daenerys murmurs. Her eyes stray to the corner Jorah rests in, his wounds wrapped in boiled cloth and his eyes closed in a sleep that looks terribly like death. Dany had washed the blood from his face and hands herself, when they’d finall untangled Jorah from his battered armour and laid him down gently on a straw pallet. Sam had been surprised at that, too, she knows, by the very notion that the Dragon Queen might get her hands dirty.

Now, he follows her gaze across the hall. “His wounds are very grave, are they not,” she says quietly. “I would not wish –” Her throat is closing over; she coughs, and for a man who should hate her, Sam’s eyes are kinder than they ought to be. “I would not wish for him to be alone, should he…”

“I’ll have someone fetch you at once,” Sam promises. His cold hand, just for a moment, brushes Daenerys’ own by her side. “But if I may be so bold, your Grace, you must go. It is expected.” Daenerys attempts a smile.

“Well, if it is _expected_ , then of course I must go,” she japes tiredly. But Sam returns the smile, even if his own is small, and extremely wary.

“Maester’s orders, your Grace,” he replies, and steps away.

 

The feast is painful. Daenerys endures it, the people who live because of the sacrifices of her armies and the flames of her dragons, these people who still do not like her. She makes a lord out of a bastard and just for a moment sees the same barely-controlled terror in his eyes that she sees every time she peers in a looking glass. She imagines Gendry Baratheon knows about as well how to be a lord as Daenerys knows how to be Westerosi.

That’s the root of the problem. Even as a Targaryen, her ancestors have only been in this country three hundred years; the Starks can trace their line back to the First Men, some eight thousand years ago. The silver hair and violet eyes that Dany has seen often in Essos, a legacy of old Valyria, is almost non-existent in Westeros. She simply looks _foreign_ , is _foreign_ , a queen of Unsullied and Dothraki and dragons, tales these Northerners heard in their nightmare stories when they were children. And even her allies cannot be trusted. Her own Hand looks at his brother like the Kingslayer hung the stars in the sky. His brother, who put his blade through the back of the king he was sworn to protect, his king, Daenerys’ father.

She knows he was mad. It doesn’t seem to make a difference.

So when she leaves the feast, she doesn’t wait for Jon to return to his rooms, the better to convince him to let his claim to her throne die in the ashes of the pyres outside. She goes to the infirmary, quieter now with most of the castle at the feast, and sits beside Jorah’s low pallet, the rasp of his laboured breathing like a knife to her heart.

Daenerys doesn’t remember falling asleep by his side, her arms folded to make a cushion for her head to rest on, but all the same she wakes to dawn light through the shutters, and Jorah is breathing easier.

 

It takes four days for him to wake.

Four days of Sam sadly shaking his head whenever he sees her, four days of Daenerys arguing with the stubborn bloody Starks and the man who used to be her lover. Four days, and so when the tiny commoner girl with the greyscale mark on her cheek comes to find her, Daenerys hadn’t even cared what message the child had brought, she just wants to get away from the Stark ladies and the indifference behind their eyes.

“Maester wants you, dragon queen,” the child says. Daenerys, utterly charmed, offers a hand to the girl, and the little one takes it, completely without fear.

“Will you escort me, my lady?” she asks, and Daenerys is too busy being charmed to even wonder what Sam could want, except the girl darts off as Dany enters the infirmary, her eyes seeking Jorah’s corner, as they have done now for days.

Jorah is sitting up, with Sam’s wife Gilly holding a cup to his lips. Something in Dany’s chest cracks open at the sight of him, awake and breathing and alive, and when he freezes, she knows he has seen her.

Daenerys strides through the silent room, aware of every eye on her, even the archer in the far corner who has a bandage over half his face and a mischievous smile lurking in the corner of his mouth.

“ _Khaleesi_ ,” Jorah rasps, voice rougher than ever from the days where he would not wake, and Dany could have borne it, if he’d called her by any other title, but she has been his _khaleesi_ since the first; the sound of it is carved into her heart. Curse the fool, he’s trying to stand so he can kneel to her.

“I’ve been waiting,” she says sharply, shoulders drawing back imperiously, staring down at him, a crumpled mess of a man at her feet. “You know how I am when I want something.”

Jorah’s forehead creases in confusion, and it’s the dearest thing Daenerys can remember seeing in her life, his lined face, the thinning patch of hair on the crown of his head. He’s so fragile, they all bloody are. hasn’t the Army of the Dead taught her that?

And he was almost gone forever.

“Forgive me, _khaleesi_ ,” he murmurs, as he has said so often before, and Daenerys lets herself smile, lets her eyes show her joy, and tells every drop of royal blood in her body to go fuck itself.

“Perhaps,” she replies, and drops to her knees, kisses the curve of his mouth before he can say another word. “If you please me,” and gods, what it is to have his forehead pressed to hers, his sky eyes full of wonder and a dawning light, to be crushed in the circle of his arms.

Every soul in the hall is clapping, and maybe this is what love is, to be open, to be bare. Maybe she’ll tell Jorah that, one of these days, now that they have enough of them.

Time, and more besides, and what is a throne in the face of that?


End file.
